Historians of Renaissance and early modern European art have long remarked on the many ways in which drawings and paintings gave viewers a glimpse of the impossible: not just depictions of mythical beasts like dragons and centaurs but more subtle impossibilities, in which the cunning of the artist panders to a certain yearning to see more broadly, deeply, or sharply than located human vision ever could.

This lecture explores a kind of impossible seeing attempted time and time again in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century natural history, natural philosophy, and even mathematics: synoptic seeing, or seeing everything all at once, in one glance. The "everything" in question could be the patterns of the prevailing winds across the globe or the type of a plant genus emerging from many individual species or the hidden regularities in the fluctuations of the weather or even the essential features of state administration. In each of these cases, vast amounts of information gleaned from many observers dispersed over centuries and continents had to be distilled into some kind of compact representation: reports from mariners at sea, from generations of botanists, from networks of weather-watchers, or from the stacks of records stored in state archives.

The representation in question could and often was verbal: a terse summary, a list of key points, a short description. But just as often, the representation was visual: a synoptic image that made seeing patterns, essences, and regularities all at once literally possible.